Sunday, August 30, 2009

Rigged samples and stacked decks in the study of EgyptiansGhada and Rutty, et. al (2008) in a study of Upper Egyptians (‘Genetic variation of 15 autosomal..’) found them closely related to people from the Israel area, followed by North Africans (Algeria) . Strangely, the authors do not sample OTHER areas close to Egypt. Their "North African" sample is not nearby Libya, or the Sudan, or Chad but distant Algeria. Curiously, they also EXCLUDE Nubians, even though study after study shows the Nubians matching more closely with Egyptians than most others.Nearby Middle Easterners from Israel are included but nearby Africans are excluded, helping to stack the results in a way that emphasizes the Middle eastern component of modern Egypt. A 2004 study of Upper Egyptians by contrast, sampled closer African populations and found Egyptians share genetic relationships with the peoples of East Africa like Ethiopians. (Stevanovitch, et al. (2004) 'Mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity..“)

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When individual craniometric variation is analyzed, the closest match to the Egyptians is other tropically adapted, dark-skinned peoples,
Confirmation of modern limb proportion studies. (Raxter & Ruff 2008, Zakrewski 2003). The tropically-adapted peoples closest to Egyptians In Africa are fellow Africans. Resemblance also occurs with other tropically adapted peoples outside Africa as in Tasmania. (--Walter A. Neves, Mark Hubbe. (2005). Cranial morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the settlement of the New World. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. vol. 102 no. 51.pp. 18309-18314

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EXCERPT

The Black-White Test Score Gap

Edited by CHRISTOPHER JENCKS and MEREDITH PHILLIPS
AFRICAN AMERICANS currently score lower than
European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and
mathematics tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude
and intelligence. This gap appears before children enter kindergarten
(figure 1-1), and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but
the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites
on most standardized tests. On some tests the typical American black scores
below more than 85 percent of whites?
The black-white test score gap does not appear to be an inevitable fact
of nature. It is true that the gap shrinks only a little when black and white
children attend the same schools. It is also true that the gap shrinks only a
little when black and white families have the same amount of schooling,
the same income, and the same wealth. But despite endless speculation, no
one has found genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less innate intellectual
ability than whites. Thus while it is clear that eliminating the test
score gap would require enormous effort by both blacks and whites and
would probably take more than one generation, we believe it can be done.

This conviction rests mainly on three facts:

--When black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black
homes, their preadolescent test scores rise dramatically. Black adoptees' scores
seem to fall in adolescence, but this is what we would expect if, as seems
likely, their social and cultural environment comes to resemble that of
other black adolescents and becomes less like that of the average white adolescent.

--Even nonverbal IQ scores are sensitive to environmental change.
Scores on nonverbal IQ tests have risen dramatically throughout the world since
the 1930s. The average white scored higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1978
than 82 percent of whites who took the test in 1932. Such findings reinforce
the implications of adoption studies: large environmental changes
can have a large impact on test performance.

--Black-white differences in academic achievement have also narrowed
throughout the twentieth century. The best trend data come from the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has been testing
seventeen-year-olds since 1971 and has repeated many of the same items
year after year. Figure 1-2 shows that the black-white reading gap narrowed
from 1.25 standard deviations in 1971 to 0.69 standard deviations in 1996.
The math gap fell from 1.33 to 0.89 standard deviations. When Min-Hsiung
Huang and Robert Hauser analyzed vocabulary scores for adults
born between 1909 and 1969, the black-white gap also narrowed by half.

In a country as racially polarized as the United States, no single change
taken in isolation could possibly eliminate the entire legacy of slavery and
Jim Crow or usher in an era of full racial equality. But if racial equality is
America's goal, reducing the black-white test score gap would probably do
more to promote this goal than any other strategy that commands broad
political support. Reducing the test score gap is probably both necessary
and sufficient for substantially reducing racial inequality in educational
attainment and earnings. Changes in education and earnings would in turn
help reduce racial differences in crime, health, and family structure,
although we do not know how large these effects would be.

This judgment contradicts Christopher Jencks and his colleagues' 1972
conclusion in Inequality that reducing cognitive inequality would not do
much to reduce economic inequality. The reason is simple: the world has
changed. In 1972 the best evidence about what happened to black workers
with high test scores came from a study by Phillips Cutright, who had
analyzed the 1964 earnings of men in their thirties who had taken the
Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) between 1949 and 1953. Overall,
employed black men earned 57.5 percent of what whites earned. Among
men with AFQT scores above the national average, black men earned 64.5
percent of what whites earned (figure 1-3). In such a world, eliminating
racial differences in test performance did not seem likely to reduce the
earnings gap very much.

Today's world is different. The best recent data on test scores and
earnings come from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which
gave the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to a national sample
of young people in 1980. Among employed men who were 31 to 36 years
old in 1993, blacks earned 67.5 percent of what whites earned, a modest
but significant improvement over the situation in 1964. The big change
occurred among blacks with test scores near or above the white average.
Among men who scored between the 30th and 49th percentiles nationally,
black earnings rose from 62 to 84 percent of the white average. Among
men who scored above the 50th percentile, black earnings rose from 65 to
96 percent of the white average. In this new world, raising black workers'
test scores looks far more important than it did in the 1960s.

Some skeptics have argued that scores on tests of this kind are really
just proxies for family background. As we shall see, family background
does affect test performance. But even when biological siblings are raised
in the same family, their test scores hardly ever correlate more than 0.5.
Among children who have been adopted, the correlation falls to around
half that level. The claim that test scores are only a proxy for family background
is therefore false. Furthermore, test score differences between siblings
raised in the same family have sizable effects on their educational
attainment and earnings. Thus while it is true that eliminating the black-white
test score gap would not reduce the black-white earnings gap quite as
much as figure 1-3 implies, the effect would surely be substantial.
Reducing the black-white test score gap would reduce racial disparities
in educational attainment as well as in earnings. The nationwide High
School and Beyond survey tested twelfth-graders in 1982 and followed
them up in 1992, when they were in their late twenties. At the time of the
followup only 13.3 percent of the blacks had earned a B.A., compared with
30 percent of the non-Hispanic whites. Many observers blame this disparity
on black parents' inability to pay college bills, black students' lack of
motivation, or the hostility that black students encounter on predominantly
white college campuses. All these factors probably play some role.
Nonetheless, figure 1-4 shows that when we compare blacks and whites with the
same twelfth grade test scores, blacks are more likely than whites to
complete college. Once we equalize test scores, High School and Beyond
blacks' 16.7 point disadvantage in college graduation rates turns into a 5.9
point advantage.

Eliminating racial differences in test performance would also allow
colleges, professional schools, and employers to phase out the racial preferences
that have caused so much political trouble over the past generation.
If selective colleges based their admission decisions solely on applicants'
predicted college grades, their undergraduate enrollment would currently
be 96 or 97 percent white and Asian. To avoid this, almost all selective colleges
and professional schools admit African Americans and Hispanics whom
they would not admit if they were white. Racial preferences of this kind are
politically unpopular. If selective colleges could achieve racial diversity
without making race an explicit factor in their admission decisions, blacks
would do better in college and whites would nurse fewer political grudges.

Advocates of racial equality might be more willing to accept our argument
that narrowing the test score gap is crucial to achieving their goals if
they believed that narrowing the gap was really feasible. But pessimism
about this has become almost universal. In the 1960s, racial egalitarians
routinely blamed the test score gap on the combined effects of black poverty,
racial segregation, and inadequate funding for black schools. That
analysis implied obvious solutions: raise black children's family income,
desegregate their schools, and equalize spending on schools that remain
racially segregated. All these steps still look useful, but none has made as
much difference as optimists expected in the early 1960s.

--The number of affluent black parents has grown substantially since
the 1960s, but their children's test scores still lag far behind those of white
children from equally affluent families. Income inequality between blacks
and whites appears to play some role in the test score gap, but it is quite
small.
--Most southern schools desegregated in the early 1970s, and southern
black nine-year-olds' reading scores seem to have risen as a result.
Even today, black third-graders in predominantly white schools read better
than initially similar blacks who have attended predominantly black schools.
But large racial differences in reading skills persist even in desegregated
schools, and a school's racial mix does not seem to have much effect on
changes in reading scores after sixth grade or on math scores at any age.

--Despite glaring economic inequalities between a few rich suburbs
and nearby central cities, the average black child and the average white
child now live in school districts that spend almost exactly the same amount
per pupil. Black and white schools also have the same average number of
teachers per pupil, the same pay scales, and teachers with almost the same
amount of formal education and teaching experience. The most important
resource difference between black and white schools seems to be that
teachers in black schools have lower test scores than teachers in white schools.
This is partly because black schools have more black teachers and partly
because white teachers in black schools have unusually low scores.

For all these reasons, the number of people who think they know how
to eliminate racial differences in test performance has shrunk steadily since
the mid-1960s. While many people still think the traditional liberal remedies
would help, few now believe they would suffice.

Demoralization among liberals has given new legitimacy to conservative
explanations for the test score gap. From an empirical viewpoint, however,
the traditional conservative explanations are no more appealing than
their liberal counterparts. These explanations fall into three overlapping
categories: the culture of poverty, the scarcity of two-parent black families,
and genes.

--In the 1960s and 1970s, many conservatives blamed blacks' problems
on a culture of poverty that rejected school achievement, the work
ethic, and the two-parent family in favor of instant gratification and episodic
violence. In the 1980s, conservatives (as well as some liberals) characterized
the "black underclass" in similar terms. But this description only
fits a tiny fraction of the black population. It certainly cannot explain why
children from affluent black families have much lower test scores than their
white counterparts.

--Conservatives invoke the decline of the family to explain social problems
almost as frequently as liberals invoke poverty. But once we control a
mother's family background, test scores, and years of schooling, whether
she is married has even less effect on her children's test scores than whether
she is poor.

--Scientists have not yet identified most of the genes that affect test
performance, so we have no direct genetic evidence regarding innate cognitive
differences between blacks and whites. But we have accumulated a fair
amount of indirect evidence since 1970. Most of it suggests that whether
children live in a "black" or "white" environment has far more impact on
their test performance than the number of Africans or Europeans in their
family tree.

Taken as a whole, then, what we have characterized as the "traditional"
explanations for the black-white test score gap do not take us very far. This
has led some people to dismiss the gap as unimportant, arguing that the
tests are culturally biased and do not measure skills that matter in the real
world. Few scholars who spend time looking at quantitative data accept
either of these arguments, so they have had to look for new explanations of
the gap. These new explanations can mostly be grouped under two overlapping
headings: culture and schooling.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many blacks and some whites dismissed
cultural explanations of the test score gap as an effort to put down
blacks for not thinking and acting like upper-middle-class whites. Since
then, cultural explanations have enjoyed a slow but steady revival. In 1978
the Nigerian anthropologist John Ogbu suggested that caste-like minorities
throughout the world tended to do poorly in school, even when they
were visually indistinguishable from the majority. Later, Ogbu argued that
because blacks had such limited opportunities in America, they developed
an "oppositional" culture that equated academic success with "acting
white." By linking black culture directly to oppression, Ogbu made it
much easier for liberals to talk about cultural differences. Jeff Howard and
Ray Hammond added another important strand to this argument when
they suggested that academic competence developed partly through competition,
and that "rumors of inferiority" made blacks reluctant to compete
academically. More recently, Claude Steele has argued that people of all
races avoid situations in which they expect others to have negative stereotypes
about them, even when they know that the stereotype does not apply.
According to Steele, many black students "disidentify" with school because
constructing a personal identity based on academic competence entails a
commitment to dealing with such stereotypes on a daily basis.

Social scientists' thinking about "school effects" has also changed since
the late 1960s. The 1966 Coleman Report and subsequent "production
function" studies convinced most economists and quantitative sociologists
that school resources had little impact on achievement. Since 1990, however,
new statistical methods, new data, and a handful of genuine experiments
have suggested that additional resources may in fact have sizable
effects on student achievement. The idea that resources matter cannot in
itself explain the black-white achievement gap, because most school resources
are now fairly equally distributed between blacks and whites. But
certain crucial resources, such as teachers with high test scores, are still
unequally distributed. And other resources, such as small classes and teachers
with high expectations, may help blacks more than whites. The idea
that resources matter also suggests that "compensatory" spending on black
schools could be valuable, at least if the money were used to cut class size
and implement policies that have been shown to help.

This book tries to bring together recent evidence on some of the most
controversial and puzzling aspects of the test score debate. Section I examines
the role of test bias, heredity, and family background in the black-white
gap. Section II looks at how and why the gap has changed over the
past generation. Section III examines educational, psychological, and cultural
explanations for the gap. Section IV analyzes some of the educational
and economic consequences of the gap. The book concludes with a commentary
by William Julius Wilson. The rest of the introduction summarizes
the book's main findings and then discusses some of their implications.

Test Bias
Many blacks and some whites believe that all cognitive tests are racially
biased. In chapter 2 Christopher Jencks discusses five possible varieties of
racial bias in testing. He concludes that two of the five constitute serious
problems and that three are probably of minor importance.

Labeling Bias
What Jencks calls "labeling bias" arises when a test claims to measure
one thing but really measures something else. This is a major problem when
tests claim to measure either intelligence or aptitude, because these terms
are widely used to describe innate "potential" as well as developed abilities.
The notion that intelligence and aptitude are innate seems to be especially
salient in discussions of racial differences. Thus, the statement that "blacks
are less intelligent than whites" is widely understood as a statement about
innate differences. Yet almost all psychologists now agree that intelligence
tests measure developed rather than innate abilities, and that people's developed
abilities depend on their environment as well as their genes. Even
psychologists who believe that racial differences in test performance are to
some extent innate agree that intelligence tests overstate the difference one
would observe if blacks and whites grew up in identical environments.
Intelligence tests therefore constitute a racially biased estimate of innate
ability, which is what nonpsychologists often mean by the word "intelligence."
Test designers cannot eliminate this bias by changing the content
of intelligence tests. The only way to eliminate it is to change the tests'
labels so as to emphasize the fact that they measure developed rather than
innate skills and abilities.

Content Bias
"Content bias" arises when a test contains questions that favor one
group over another. Suppose, for example, that black and white children
spoke mutually unintelligible versions of English. A test given in white
English would then underestimate black children's skills and vice versa.
This kind of content bias does not appear to be a significant problem for
the tests discussed in this book. If one takes a standard vocabulary test and
winnows out words with unusually large black-white differences, for example,
the black-white gap does not shrink much. Likewise, if one compares
black children to slightly younger white children, blacks and whites
find the same words easy and difficult. Nor is the black-white gap on tests
that measure familiarity with the content of American culture consistently
larger than the gap on nonverbal tests that do not measure familiarity with
any particular culture. Because the racial gap in children's test performance
is not confined to items that measure exposure to white language, culture,
or behavior but is dramatically reduced when black children are raised in
white homes, Jencks suggests that it may reflect differences in the way blacks
and whites are taught to deal with what they do not know and in the emphasis
they put on learning new cognitive skills.

Methodological Bias
Methodological bias arises when we assess mastery of some skill or
body of information in a way that underestimates the competence of one
group relative to another. Methodological bias would be important if, say,
having black rather than white testers changed the relative standing of black
and white test takers. That does not appear to be the case. There is some
evidence that describing a test in different ways can affect different groups'
relative performance, but we do not yet know how general this is.

Prediction Bias
A generation ago many egalitarians argued that using the SAT to screen
applicants for selective colleges was unfair to blacks because tests of this
kind underestimated black applicants' academic potential. For most colleges,
academic potential means undergraduate grades. Almost all colleges
have found that when they compare black and white undergraduates who
enter with the same SAT scores, blacks earn lower grades than whites, not
just in their first year but throughout their college careers. Likewise, when
firms compare black and white workers with the same test scores, blacks
usually get slightly lower ratings from their supervisors and also do a little
worse on more objective measures of job performance. In psychological
parlance, this means that tests like the SAT do not suffer from "prediction
bias."

Selection System Bias
The test score gap between black and white job applicants has traditionally
averaged about one standard deviation. When employers do not
screen workers, the performance gap is likely to be much smaller--typically
more like two-fifths of a standard deviation. The reason for this
discrepancy is not that blacks perform better than whites with the same test
scores. The reason is that test scores explain only 10 to 20 percent of the
variation in job performance, and blacks are far less disadvantaged on the
noncognitive determinants of job performance than on the cognitive ones.
Because blacks perform no better on the job than whites with similar
scores, many people assume that using tests to select workers is racially fair.
But if racial fairness means that blacks and whites who could do a job
equally well must have an equal chance of getting the job, a selection system
that emphasizes test scores is almost always unfair to most blacks (and
to everyone else with low test scores). Imagine a company that has 600
applicants for 100 openings. Half the applicants are black and half are
white. If the firm hires all applicants as temporary workers and retains
those who perform best on the job, and if the performance gap between
blacks and whites averages 0.4 standard deviations, about 36 blacks will get
permanent jobs. If the firm selects the 100 applicants with the highest
scores, about 13 blacks will get permanent jobs. Jencks argues that the
first outcome should be our yardstick for defining racial fairness. Using
this yardstick, the second system is clearly biased against blacks. In effect,
Jencks says, the second system forces blacks to pay for the fact that social
scientists have unusually good measures of a trait on which blacks are unusually
disadvantaged.

The Heredity-Environment Controversy
When the U.S. Army launched the world's first large-scale mental testing
program in 1917, it found that whites scored substantially higher than
blacks. Biological determinists immediately cited these findings as evidence
that whites had more innate ability than blacks, but cultural determinists
quickly challenged this interpretation. By the late 1930s most social scientists
seem to have been convinced that either genetic or cultural factors
could explain the gap. Neither side had a convincing way of separating the
effects of heredity from the effects of culture, so the debate was an empirical
standoff.

After 1945 the horrors of the Holocaust made all genetic explanations
of human differences politically suspect. Once the U.S. Supreme Court declared
de jure racial segregation unconstitutional in 1954, genetic explanations
of racial differences became doubly suspect because they were identified
with southern resistance to desegregation. As a result, environmentalism
remained hegemonic throughout the 1960s. Then in 1969 Arthur Jensen published
an article in the Harvard Educational Review arguing that educational
programs for disadvantaged children initiated as part of the War on
Poverty had failed, and that the black-white test score gap probably had a
substantial genetic component? Jensen's argument went roughly as follows:
--Most of the variation in white IQ scores is genetic.
--No one has advanced a plausible environmental explanation for the
black-white gap.
--Therefore it is more reasonable to assume that part of the black-white
gap is genetic than to assume it is entirely environmental.

Jensen's article created such a furor that psychologists once again began
looking for evidence that bore directly on the question of whether racial
differences in test performance were partly innate. Richard Nisbett reviews
their findings in chapter 3.
Two small studies have tried to compare genetically similar children
raised in black and white families. Elsie Moore found that black children
adopted by white parents had IQ scores 13.5 points higher than black
children adopted by black parents. Lee Willerman and his colleagues compared
children with a black mother and a white father to children with a
white mother and a black father. The cleanest comparison is for mixed-race
children who lived only with their mother. Mixed-race children who lived
with a white mother scored 11 points higher than mixed-race children who
lived with a black mother. Since the black-white IQ gap averaged about
15 points at the time these two studies were done, they imply that about
four-fifths of that gap was traceable to family-related factors (including
schools and neighborhoods).

A better-known study dealt with black and mixed-race children adopted
by white parents in Minnesota. The mixed-race children were adopted earlier
in life and had higher IQ scores than the children with two black parents.
When the 29 black children were first tested, they scored at least ten
points higher than the norm for black children, presumably because they
had more favorable home environments than most black children. When
these children were retested in their late teens or twenties, their IQ scores
had dropped and were no longer very different from those of Northern
blacks raised in black families. The most obvious explanation for this
drop is that the adoptees had moved out of their white adoptive parents'
homes into less favorable environments. But because the study did not
cover black or mixed-race children adopted by black parents, it does not
seem to us to provide strong evidence on either side of the heredity-environment
debate.

Racially Mixed Children
Race is not a well-defined biological category. It is a social category,
whose biological correlates vary geographically and historically. America
has traditionally classified people as black using the "one drop" rule, under
which anyone with known black ancestors is black. As a result, people are
often treated as black even though they have a lot of European ancestors. If
blacks with a lot of European ancestors had the same test scores as those
with no European ancestors, we could safely conclude that the black-white
test score gap was a by-product of social classification rather than heredity.
But when we find that light-skinned blacks score higher than dark-skinned
blacks, we cannot rule out the possibility that this difference is environmental.
Light skin has traditionally been a social asset for black Americans,
and the correlation between light skin and test performance could reflect
this fact. To get around this problem, we need less visible genetic markers.
Two studies have used blood markers to estimate the percentage of Europeans
in a black child's family tree. Neither study found a correlation between
the number of "European" blood markers and IQ.

Although racially mixed children are culturally black in America, and
are almost always raised by black parents in black communities, this is not
true everywhere. Klans Eyferth studied the illegitimate children of black
and white soldiers stationed in Germany as part of the army of occupation
after World War II. All these children were raised by their German mothers.
There was considerable prejudice against blacks in Germany at the
time, and any child of a German mother who looked black was also presumed
to be illegitimate, which carried additional stigma. But mixed-race
German children did not attend predominantly black schools, live in black
neighborhoods, or (presumably) have predominantly black (or mixed-race)
friends. When Eyferth gave these children a German version of the Wechsler
IQ test, children with black fathers and white fathers had almost identical
scores.

Taken in isolation, none of these studies would carry much weight.
The samples are small, and the comparisons could be distorted by unmeasured
genetic or environmental influences. But Nisbett argues that their
consistency gives them far more weight that they would have if taken one
by one. We agree. We read these studies as supporting three tentative
conclusions:

--When "black" genes are not visible to the naked eye and are not
associated with membership in a black community, they do not have much
effect on young children's test scores.
--Growing up in an African-American rather than a European-American
family substantially reduces a young child's test performance.
--When black Americans raised in white families reach adolescence,
their test scores fall.

These studies do not prove that blacks and whites would have exactly
the same test scores if they were raised in the same environment and treated
the same way. But we find it hard to see how anyone reading these studies
with an open mind could conclude that innate ability played a large role in
the black-white gap
.
Effects of Family Background

Chapter 4, by Meredith Phillips, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Greg Duncan,
Pamela Klebanov, and Jonathan Crane tries to estimate the effect of specific
family characteristics on young children's test scores. This is not easy.
Hundreds of different family characteristics correlate with children's test
performance. Disentangling their effects is a statistical nightmare. Almost
any family characteristic can also serve as a proxy for a child's genes. We
know, for example, that a mother's genes affect her test scores and that her
test scores affect her educational attainment. Thus when we compare children
whose mothers finished college to children whose mothers only finished
high school, the two groups' vocabulary scores can differ for genetic
as well as environmental reasons. Even when a child is adopted, moreover,
the way the adoptive parents treat the child may depend on the child's
genes. Parents read more to children who seem to enjoy it, for example,
and whether children enjoy being read to may well depend partly on their
genes.

The best solution to such problems is to conduct experiments. In the
1970s, for example, the federal government conducted a series of "negative
income tax" experiments that increased the cash income of randomly selected
low-income families. These experiments did not last very long, the
samples getting any given "treatment" were small, and the results were poorly
reported, so it is hard to know exactly what happened. Short-term income
increases did not have statistically reliable effects on low-income children's
test scores, but that does not mean their true effect was zero. As far as we
know, these are the only randomized experiments that have altered families'
socioeconomic characteristics and then measured the effect on children's
test scores.

In theory, we can also separate the effects of parents' socioeconomic
status from the effects of their genes by studying adopted children. But
because adoption agencies try to screen out "unsuitable" parents, the range
of environments in adoptive homes is usually restricted. The adoptive
samples for which we have data are also small. Thus while parental SES
does not predict adopted children's IQ scores as well as it predicts natural
children's IQ scores, the data on adopted children are not likely to persuade
skeptics.

Anyone who wants to estimate the impact of specific family characteristics
on children's test scores must therefore rely heavily on surveys of children
raised by their natural parents. The best source of such data is the
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (CNLSY) that Phillips and her
colleagues use in chapter 4. Black five- and six-year-olds in their sample
scored about 16 points (one standard deviation) below whites on the
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Traditional measures of educational
and economic inequality do not explain much of this gap. Measures
of a mother's socioeconomic position when she was growing up and measures
of her current parenting practices explain considerably more.

Parental Schooling
Early in the twentieth century white parents typically completed two
or three more years of school than blacks. By 1991 the gap between black
and white mothers with children in first grade had fallen to 0.8 years.
Many observers have suggested that this change played a significant role in
reducing the black-white gap in children's test scores. But if parental schooling
correlates with children's test scores mainly because it is a proxy for
parental genes, changing the distribution of schooling will not affect the
distribution of test scores, either for individuals or for groups.

When Phillips and her colleagues control a mother's family background,
the estimated effect of an extra year of school on her child's PPVT score
falls from 1.73 to 1.15 points. When they also control the mother's AFQT
score (their proxy for her cognitive genotype), the effect falls to somewhere
between 0.5 and 0.6 points. This suggests that a two-year reduction in
the black-white education gap among mothers would cut the PPVT gap by
about a point. Of course, if the schooling gap narrowed because black and
white parents had grown up in more similar homes or had more similar
test scores, the predicted reduction in the PPVT gap between black and
white children would be larger. The CNLSY suggests that cutting the
schooling gap between black and white fathers would have a smaller effect
than cutting the gap between black and white mothers. But this may not be
true for older children, for whom the effects of mother's and father's education
are roughly equal.

Income Effects
White CNLSY parents reported 73 percent more income than their
black counterparts. When Phillips and her colleagues compared black and
white children whose families had had the same average annual income
since the child was born, the PPVT gap narrowed by 2.4 points. But once
again it does not follow that raising all black families' incomes by 73 percent
would raise their children's PPVT scores by 2.4 points. To estimate
the effect of increasing black parents' incomes without changing the traits
that cause the current income gap, we need to know how much parental
income affects children's test scores when we compare parents with the
same family background, test scores, and schooling. These controls cut the
estimated effect of parental income on PPVT scores by about three-fifths.
Even this estimate is probably on the high side, because it does not control
either the father's test scores or his family background. Thus, the CNLSY
suggests that eliminating black-white income differences would cut the
PPVT gap by less than 1 point. Eliminating the causes of the black-white
income gap might, of course, have a much larger effect. Racial disparities
in parental wealth have almost no effect on children's test scores once Phillips
and her colleagues control income, schooling, and the mother's test scores.

Single-Parent Families
Once Phillips and her colleagues hold constant the mother's family
background, educational attainment, and test scores, children who have
grown up in an intact family score no higher on the PPVT than children
from single-parent families. Other studies find slightly larger effects, but
the effects are never large enough to be of any substantive importance.

Parenting Strategies
Knowing parents' education and income tells us something about how
they raise their children, but not much. The CNLSY tried to measure
parenting practices directly, both by asking parents what they did and by
asking interviewers how mothers treated their children during the interview.
Parenting practices appear to have a sizable impact on children's test
scores. Even with parental education, family income, and the mother's AFQT
scores controlled, racial differences in parenting practices account for between
a fifth and a quarter of the racial gap on the PPVT. This suggests that
changes in parenting practices might do more to reduce the black-white
test score gap than changes in parents' educational attainment or income.
We cannot be sure how large these effects would be, however, because the
way parents treat their children is a proxy for all kinds of unmeasured
parental characteristics, as well as for the child's own genes.

Grandparents
Upwardly mobile parents often raise their children the way they themselves
were raised. Phillips and her colleagues find that racial differences in
parenting practices are partly traceable to the fact that even when black and
white parents have the same test scores, educational attainment, income,
wealth, and number of children, black parents are likely to have grown up
in less advantaged households. Phillips and her colleagues also find that
this can lower black children's test scores. In other words, it can take more
than one generation for successful families to adopt the "middle-class"
parenting practices that seem most likely to increase children's cognitive
skills.

Compared to...

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Affirmative Action: The Fact Gap
Two teams of scholars explore the consequences of college admission policies in America.

By ALAN WOLFE

In
''The Shape of the River,'' William G. Bowen and Derek Bok -- former
presidents of Princeton and Harvard Universities -- seek ''to build a
firmer foundation of fact'' under America's affirmative action debate.
Amen. Facts have been sorely missing in accounts of the role played by
race in admissions to institutions of higher education. To some degree
the fact gap exists because both those who defend affirmative action and
those who oppose it argue from positions of high principle: a
commitment to diversity on the one hand or a defense of individual merit
on the other. When principle is at stake, facts become conveniences to
be cited when helpful and to be explained away when harmful.

But the absence of hard information is also due to the policies of
educational institutions themselves, which keep secret the kinds of data
which would shed light on who gets admitted to them and who does not --
and why. (Even Bowen and Bok are obligated not to reveal the names of
the five institutions whose admissions policies they examine in detail.)
With the publication of their book, and of ''The Black-White Test Score
Gap,'' edited by Christopher Jencks, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of
Social Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Meredith
Phillips, an assistant professor of policy studies at the University of
California, Los Angeles, the fact gap has closed considerably. Both
volumes are masterly in their technical use of data and sensitive to the
limits of what data can reveal. It detracts nary a whit from the
accomplishments of either to say that even with the facts they present,
the roles race should and does play in college admissions will remain
hotly contested.

As Thomas J. Kane, who teaches public policy at Harvard's John F.
Kennedy School of Government, points out in his contribution to the
Jencks and Phillips collection, roughly 60 percent of America's
institutions of higher education admit nearly all who apply and
therefore do not give preference to any particular race. At the best
schools, by contrast, efforts to diversify the student body translate
into a 400-point bonus for minority students on the SAT tests. The bonus
is so large because, in 1995, 70 African-Americans scored over 700 on
the verbal portions of the SAT; 221 more scored over 650. (The
corresponding numbers for whites were 8,239 and 16,216.) The five or six
most competitive colleges, in other words, fight over the 300 or so
African-Americans with the highest scores; the next 20 or 30 colleges,
still top ranked, have to drop down to those scoring in the 1200's or
below if they want their student bodies to reflect the percentage of the
population that is black or Hispanic -- all the while rejecting many
white applicants with much higher scores.

One effect of taking race into account into account in the admissions
process is that among applicants with combined SAT scores in the low
1200 range, a black applicant is three times as likely to get into an
elite college as a white applicant. Bowen and Bok argue that both the
colleges and the black students who attend them still benefit. We ought
not to forget, they write, that although whites with very high scores
may be ''spectacularly well qualified'' for college, blacks with
somewhat lower scores are anything but unqualified. In addition, SAT
scores, while important, are not a one-to-one stand-in for merit; not
only do they predict academic performance poorly, they also say little
about who will contribute most to other students or will become eventual
leaders in their fields.
Critics of affirmative action say that it is unfair to black students to
be forced to compete against whites who are better prepared for
demanding academic work. Some of the evidence collected by Bowen and Bok
confirms this; in less selective institutions, black graduation rates
six years after entering college are significantly lower than white
graduation rates. Black students nearly always perform less well than
white students, and also perform below the levels predicted by their SAT
scores. A chapter in the Jencks and Phillips collection calls this
''disturbing'' and adds that ''most sobering of all, the performance gap
is greatest for the black students with the highest SAT's.'' A
co-author of that chapter is William G. Bowen. Still, Bowen and Bok
conclude that the overall picture proves that minority students are not
''overmatched'' in comparison with whites admitted with much higher SAT
scores to the nation's top schools. The picture improves even more if
one examines the years after college. Despite their lower SAT scores,
black graduates of the nation's selective colleges are active
participants in civic life. They report high degrees of satisfaction
with their experiences in college.
In their most impressive finding, Bowen and Bok show that of the 700 or
so black entering students from the class of 1976 who would not have
been admitted to one of the nation's more selective institutions had
strictly race-neutral criteria been applied, 225 obtained professional
or graduate degrees, 70 became doctors, 60 became lawyers, 125 became
business executives; and as a body, they earned an average of $71,000
annually. Bowen and Bok interpret these facts to mean that an increase
in the size of the black middle class justifies racial preferences. They
may well be correct. There is no more important step to be taken along
the road to racial justice than building and strengthening a black
middle class. Every African-American who enters a profession or buys a
house in the suburbs gives the lie to two pervasive cynicisms -- one
that blames black Americans for their own inequality and the other that
in blaming white racism for all the ills of America ends up excusing
self-defeating black isolationism.
But it would be wrong to conclude from ''The Shape of the River'' that
affirmative action works. What Bowen and Bok have proved is that going
to a top college works. Their book unintentionally fuels rather than
quenches the passions over affirmative action. For if a degree from a
top college benefits those who receive it as much as Bowen and Bok
clearly demonstrate, then those passed over for admission to those
colleges really do have cause for complaint.
And because Bowen and Bok's data are limited to the more selective
institutions, they have little to tell us about the fates of minority
students who never make it to the level of applying to those colleges.
The material assembled by Jencks and Phillips helps explain why that
group is so large. A gap between blacks and whites on intelligence tests
appears when children are 4 years old. By the age of 6, black
vocabulary scores match those of whites who are 5. By the age of 17,
black scores are equal to those of white 13-year-olds. This means that
African-Americans who show up in the Bowen and Bok study have already
won some of life's biggest battles. By scoring in the 1200 range on SAT
tests, they are most likely either middle-class already or will push
themselves into the middle class through their determination and effort.
The real problem arises among those black high school graduates who
never fully recover from their initial disadvantage in testing and who
therefore wind up scoring in the 800-1000 range on SAT's. The best of
these students will attend colleges that are somewhat selective, and
which therefore still exercise some degree of racial preference in
admissions. But while the preference is smaller than at the most
selective colleges, the impact on many students is larger (Thomas Kane's
data indicate that black and Hispanic students receive an 8 percent to
10 percent preference at the most academically selective fifth of
four-year institutions, but only a 3 percent preference at schools
ranked in the fourth of the five tiers). Getting into and graduating
from one of these colleges may well play a more significant role in the
life prospects of a medium-range SAT scorer of either race than
graduation from a top college plays for a high scorer of either race,
for these are the colleges that historically made it possible to move
from the working class into the middle class. The benefits gained by
minority students at the top colleges, in other words, could come at the
price of greater conflict between black and white applicants to those
less selective colleges where middle-class aspirations meet head on.
An even greater number of minority high school students will score so
low on the SAT's or equivalent tests that they will not go to college at
all or will attend technical schools and community colleges. Should
they lose out because they test so badly? Are the tests biased? There
is, as Jencks points out, a ''labeling'' bias: ''People hear statements
like . . . 'blacks have less academic aptitude than whites' as claims
that blacks are innately inferior.'' The pervasive use of such tests, he
adds, constitutes a ''selection system bias,'' because relying on the
tests rather than performance will invariably discriminate against
blacks and Hispanic applicants.
Nonetheless, Jencks writes, ''the skill differences that the tests
measure are real.'' They also matter. In their chapter in ''The
Black-White Test Score Gap,'' William R. Johnson, who teaches economics
at the University of Virginia, and Derek Neal, a professor of economics
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, show that wage differentials
between black and white male workers can be attributed largely to
differences in the acquisition of basic verbal and mathematical skills.
Between 1971 and 1996, according to Meredith Phillips and her
colleagues, the gap between black and white test scores narrowed
considerably, even though minorities were still underrepresented at the
very highest levels. This closing of the gap, moreover, was due to
rising black scores, not falling white ones, indicating that something
-- perhaps the War on Poverty, perhaps increased black expectations,
perhaps improved schooling, especially in math -- was working. If such
improvements dramatically undercut genetic explanations of intelligence,
the fact that the gap appears once again to be growing is a great
puzzle for social policy.
Chapters in ''The Black-White Test Score Gap'' explore the influence of
parents, teachers, peers and society as a whole in explaining why blacks
and whites perform differently on such tests. Firm conclusions are hard
to come by, and some of the authors disagree with the hypotheses
suggested by others. Still, the bulk of the material in this book leaves
the reader with the sense that the causes are deep and difficult to
overcome. As Phillips and her colleagues point out, we could eliminate
at least half, and probably more, of the black-white test score gap at
the end of the 12th grade by eliminating the differences that exist
before children enter first grade. Such is the disparity between the
races that a frightening number of African-Americans lose a good shot at
entering the middle class even before they enter kindergarten. There
are nonetheless good reasons to do our best to overcome this gap.
''Eliminating racial differences in test performance,'' Jencks and
Phillips write, ''would also allow colleges, professional schools and
employers to phase out the racial preferences that have caused so much
political trouble over the past generation.'' Of all the facts presented
in these two sobering books, the most important is this: When we debate
using racial preferences to admit more black and Hispanic students to
the nation's best colleges, we are considering the fate of a shockingly
small number of people.

"In this regard it is interesting to note that limb proportions of Predynastic Naqada people in Upper Egypt are reported to be "Super-Negroid," meaning that the distal segments are elongated in the fashion of tropical Africans.....skin color intensification and distal limb elongation are apparent wherever people have been long-term residents of the tropics."

"An earlier generation of anthropologists tried to explain face form in the Horn of Africa as the result of admixture from hypothetical “wandering Caucasoids,” (Adams, 1967, 1979; MacGaffey, 1966; Seligman, 1913, 1915, 1934), but that explanation founders on the paradox of why that supposedly potent “Caucasoid” people contributed a dominant quantity of genes for nose and face form but none for skin color or limb proportions. It makes far better sense to regard the adaptively significant features seen in the Horn of Africa as solely an in situ response on the part of separate adaptive traits to the selective forces present in the hot dry tropics of eastern Africa. From the observation that 12,000 years was not a long enough period of time to produce any noticeable variation in pigment by latitude in the New World and that 50,000 years has been barely long enough to produce the beginnings of a gradation in Australia (Brace, 1993a), one would have to argue that the inhabitants of the Upper Nile and the East Horn of Africa have been equatorial for many tens of thousands of years."(-- C.L. Brace, 1993. Clines and clusters..")

Brace 2005 Fig 4 lumps together ancient Egyptians (Naqada), Nubians, Somalians and Israeli Fellaheen to create a Northeast Africa category. The closest non-Africans to that group are OLDER Europeans and North Africans who looked like dark-skinned Africans.

Quote: “The surprise is that the Neolithic peoples of Europe and their Bronze Age successors are not closely related to the modern inhabitants.. It is a further surprise that the Epipalaeolithic Natufian of Israel from whom the Neolithic realm was assumed to arise has a clear link to Sub-Saharan Africa..”

Assorted “Aryan” thinkers use this diagram from Tishkoff (2000) to claim Caucasoid primacy in Ethiopians। However Tishkoff avoids admixture models, noting that the intermediate position of Ethiopians is due to their position in the Out of Africa flow.

Said ‘Aryans’ somehow fail to notice that their own diagram debunks their claims। The people in the Ethiopian cluster are dark-skinned tropically adapted types, including sub-Saharan Somalis, and Papuans/Melanesians. Other closer peoples are dark-skinned and tropically adapted like South African Nama and tropical Atayal Taiwanese indigenes. “White Caucasoids” like Nordic Danes or Near Eastern Yemenis are even further away. The primary resemblance is with black tropical peoples.

“The fact that the Ethiopians and Somalis have a subset of the sub-Saharan African haplotype diversity and that the non-African populations have a subset of the diversity present in Ethiopians and Somalis makes simple-admixture models less likely.. a subset of this northeastern-African population migrated out of Africa and populated the rest of the globe.[Tishkoff et al. (2000) Short Tandem-Repeat]

Asian hordes sweeping into the Nile Valley to civilize the natives?

Stymied by lack of evidence for ‘Nordic’ or ‘Mediterranean’ Egyptians, Aryan ‘thinkers’ have seized on an Asian angle. The work of Indian researchers Chandrasekar. et al. (2007). "YAP insertion signature in South Asia” found YAP changes to haplogroup D in India. Aryan thinkers use this to postulate an influx of ‘Caucasian’ Asians into the Nile Valley to civilize the natives, arguing that the African haplogroup ‘E” is a sub-set of ‘D”. However, the reputed ‘Aryan’ mutation (M174 allele) is found in the ancestral state in all African lineages including haplogroup E, effectively killing the Asiatic origin theory. African Haplogroup ‘E” has its highest distribution and occurrence in Africa, not Asia, and the work of scientist Underhill (2000. 2001), Cruciana (2004) and Hammer (2008) confirm its African provenance. According to Underhill et al 2000, the M174 data alone would support an African origin of the YAP insertion.

Underhill and Kivisild, (2007) "Use of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA" hold that the African origin of the YAP+ polymorphism is more parsimonious and more plausible than the Asian origin hypothesis. Other authors who have published or co-published works in support of an African origin the YAP+ include Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Toomas Kivisild, Spencer Wells, Linda Stone and Paul F. Lurquin.

Another study of haplogroup DE world wide found it in only 2 individuals from Nigeria (Weale 2003). A 2007 study by Rosa, et al (Y-chromosomal diversity..") found DE in Guinea, West Africa, and another in 2008, (Shi, Zhing, et al ("Y chromosome evidence..") found it in 2 Tibetans.. Overall the main weight of data lies with Africans, not Asiatics like Tibetans or Indians, again discrediting 'Aryan' claims॥

“Haplogroup CF and DE molecular ancestors first evolved inside Africa and subsequently contributed as Y chromosome founders to pioneering migrations that successfully colonized Asia. While not proof, the DE and CF bifurcation (Figure 8d ) is consistent with independent colonization impulses possibly occurring in a short time interval."(- Underhill and Kivislid, 2007, ‘Use of Y Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA..’)

DNA Haplogroup "E" originated in Africa and has its highest frequencies in Africa,. DNA studies show Africans with "E" migrated to populate ancient Egypt and the Nile Valley.

DNA studies of haplogroup ‘E’ show that the primary peopling of ancient Egypt was by Africans with ‘E” derived lineages, not those of Europe or the Middle East. “E” appears at higher frequencies than other individual haplotypes such as the Near Eastern “J” in some studies of modern Egypt. (Luis 2004)

DNA Haplogroup ‘E” originated in Africa, and is the dominant DNA haplogroup on the continent. It appears in Europe and the Near East due to the Out of Africa migrations (-Cruciani et al. (2007), "Tracing Past Human Male..”

Sub-clades of haplogroup ‘E” were to move north into Egypt, North Africa & other areas of Africa. Other branches later moved into the Middle East, and Europe.

“Nearly all of the Y chromosomes in the sub-Saharan collections belong to groups A, B, and E. Furthermore, the vast majority of these individuals (92.2%) are members of group E , the only group observed in all nine populations.. In Egypt, the order of the polymorphic groups is slightly different: E (39.5%) , J (32.0%), G (8.8%), K2 (8.2%), and R (7.5%).. Egyptian M35 lineages are considerably larger than those of Oman.”“A more recent dispersal out of Africa , represented by the E3b-M35 chromosomes, expanded northward during the Mesolithic (Underhill et al. 2001b). The East African origin of this lineage is supported by the much larger variance of the E3b-M35 males in Egypt versus Oman (0.5 versus 0.14; table 3)..”

"M35 chromosomes are seen in the Oman, North African, and East African populations, as well as in the South African Khoisans (Underhill et al. 2000; Cruciani et al. 2002; present study) .. In contrast, the E3b*-M35 lineages appear to be confined almost exclusively to the sub-Saharan populations , except for a very low incidence in Egypt (2.7%) and a somewhat larger frequency in Ethiopia..”

“The present-day Egyptian E3b-M35 distribution most likely results from a juxtaposition of various demic episodes। Since the E3b*-M35 lineages appear to be confined mostly to the sub-Saharan populations, it is conceivable that the initial migrations toward North Africa from the south primarily involved derivative E3b-M35 lineages . These include E3b1-M78, a haplogroup especially common in Ethiopia॥"

Ethiopians share some of the deepest DNA links with one of the most ancient of African populations - the Khosians or San (aka 'Bushmen'). Khosians have several genetic strands but are predominantly and clearly an African population, not Eurasian.

"only the Ethiopians share with the Khoisan the deepest human Y-chromosome clades (the African specific Groups I and II) but with a repertoire of very different haplotypes. “(-- Cavalli-Sforza et at. “Ethiopians and Khoisan Share the Deepest Clades of the Human y-chromosome Phylogeny” 2002)

Knight (2003- ‘African Y-chromosome and mtDNA..’ found that the Khoisan are similar to other sub-Saharan African populations, rather than Eurasians.

"According to Knight et al. (2003) Y-haplogroup A, the most diverse or oldest-diverging Y haplogroup transmitted purely by patrilineal descent, is today present in various Khoisan groups at frequencies of 12-44%, and the other Y-haplogroups present have been formed by recent admixture of Bantu male lineages E3a (18-54%), and in some groups, noticeable Pygmy traces are visible (B2b). The Khoisan also show the largest genetic diversity in matrilineally transmitted mtDNA of all human populations. Their original mtDNA haplogroups L1d and L1k are one of the oldest-diverging female lineages as well. However, analysis of neutral autosomal (inherited through either parent) genes finds that the Khoisan are similar to other sub-Saharan African populations.'(See--*Knight, Alec, et al.: African Y chromosome and mtDNA divergence provides insight into the history of click languages. Current Biology, 13, 464-473 (2003).)

"In a comparison of the different groups of Ethiopians, the Oromo show an incidence (62.8%) of the M35 cluster higher than that in the Amhara (35.4%, P